September 29 - October 3 2005
Alexandre Castonguay and Marc Audette
DiVA 2005 (Digital and Video Art Fair, New York)
Embassy Suites Hotel, 102 North End Avenue, New York, NY 10281. Room # 415
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (PFOAC) is pleased to announce its participation in DiVA, the first art fair in the United States dedicated exclusively to digital and video art. Serving as an international destination for collectors, art dealers, museums, curators, and artists, DiVA will feature the diverse and innovative work of new media artists exploring and pushing the digital boundaries. DiVA will take place at the Embassy Suites Hotel located at 102 North End Avenue on the waterfront in Lower Manhattan from Friday, March 11 through Sunday, March 13, 2005. DiVA will pay a Tribute to Bruce Nauman through continuous screenings of the artist`s videos as well as through daily discussion panels with leading practitioners and theorists in the field who will investigate Nauman`s significant impact on contemporary video and digital art.
In room 415, PFOAC will be feature works by Alexandre Castonguay and Marc Audette. Alexandre Castonguay (in collaboration with Mathieu Bouchard) will present Digitale, 2003-2004, an upholstered bench with integrated touch screen and modified Kodak Brownie box camera, video projection and a computer. In Digitale, the digital and analog modes of representation are put into play. Expectations of spectacle, responsiveness and quick gratification of the former are thwarted by the slow, deliberate development of the latter. The viewer's touch embodies the image while pressing a shutter initiates a distantiation from our representation. The design, reminiscent of modernist utopias of access and equality, determines the behavior and experience of the viewer. Alexandre Castonguay is professor of New Media in the Visual Arts Department of the University of Ottawa. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal will unveil in the Fall of 2005 his most recent work in a solo exhibition curated by Sandra Grant-Marchand. The gallery will also launch Alexandre Castonguay's first solo catalogue thanks to the support of la Société de développement des enterprises culturelles.
Marc Audette will present O/Water, 2005, a video projection and C-print of multiple dimensions. The artist states: "Images, including digital images, are intimately connected to the main characteristics of human activity like religion, nationality, membership and art. However, language, like image, is not a neutral vehicle. Setting ideal standards for the digital image means setting the language to be used for defining concepts, ideas and realities. All of which can be presented on a monitor, print paper, and photographic paper or on canvas since the last support also can be printed. It is this fine but unequivocal relation between tools and "œuvre" that animate this work." Marc Audette teaches New Media and Photography at York University (Toronto) and has shown extensively in Canada.
PFOAC thanks the Canada Council and SODEC for their support.
ARTICLES
Kemeny, Marika. Glendon, Marc Audette Featured at DiVA New Media Art Fair in Manhattan, 17 mars, 2005
Capasso, Ariadna & Korchak, Diana. The New York Art World, avril 2005, p12-13